The Great Agnostic Read Online Free PDF Page A

do not know what his experience is,” Ingersoll said of the opposing counsel’s cynicism about the possibility of love in old age, “but I hope no fate like that will ever overtake me.” 1 Then Ingersoll retired from the public arena. He and his wife spent the last month of his life at the home, overlooking the Hudson River near Dobbs Ferry, New York, of their elder daughter, Eva, and her husband, railroad magnate Walston Brown. Mrs. Ingersoll’s sister, Sue, and her husband, Clint Farrell, who would publish the definitive twelve-volume edition of Ingersoll’s collected works, also lived with the Great Agnostic during his final weeks. The Ingersoll and Parker families were unusually close for in-laws; Mrs. Ingersoll’s father had been a well-known freethinker in Peoria, and the family was related to Theodore Parker, a leading Transcendentalist, abolitionist, and reform-minded Unitarian minister in Boston during the two decades before the Civil War. But Robert had an extra reason for wanting the company of relatives while his own time was running out. He was well aware that after the deaths of nearly every importantcritic of religion, including Paine and Voltaire, the press and clergy circulated rumors that the “infidels” had either committed suicide in remorse for the unforgivable sin of denying the existence of God and the authority of his church (not that the clerics agreed on which church actually possessed divine authority) or had, at the last minute, renounced lifelong antireligious beliefs and begged God for forgiveness. Ingersoll wanted his wife, daughters, and in-laws to bear witness to his rejection of the supernatural even in the face of impending death.
    Ingersoll died on July 21, 1899 (coincidentally, the day of Ernest Hemingway’s birth). According to his obituary in the
New York World,
Ingersoll had spent the previous evening playing billiards with his brother-in-law. Having a cigar on the porch and looking toward the Hudson, he turned to Farrell and remarked, “This is a beautiful world.” The next morning, after having breakfast with his family, he took a nap in his bedroom, with his wife watching over him. His sister-in-law came upstairs as he was about to dress for lunch and offered to bring up a tray so that he and Eva could eat together in the bedroom. “Oh no, I do not want to trouble you,” was his last sentence. Sue Farrell made some joke, and Ingersoll laughed, closed his eyes, and died without further comments. The details are known because Eva Ingersoll and her sister gave the information to the press to counteract the already swirlingrumors that Bob Ingersoll had either committed suicide in a fit of despair over his misspent life or called for a minister or a priest on his deathbed. *
    Ingersoll would have particularly liked the headline over his obituary in the
Chicago Tribune,
“Ingersoll Dies Smiling.” And he would probably have taken just as much pleasure in a paragraph in his
New York Times
obituary, which identified what was apparently a shocking character trait—no-strings generosity to his wife and children—in a nineteenth-century
paterfamilias.
“He earned great sums of money, both as a lecturer and a lawyer, but he let them go like water,” the
Times
reported with an air of disapproval. “It was his habit to keep money in the house in an open drawer, to which any member of his family was free to go and take what he wanted.” 2 One suspects, since all newspapers were wedded to the generic “he” at the time, that what really shocked the obituary writer was the fact that all of the members of Ingersoll’s immediate family were women, and it was a “she,” not a “he,” who had been accorded such reckless access to cash. The obituary also noted that Ingersoll was “a constant student of Shakespeare” (presumably to his credit) but added that Shakespeare’s works